Various types of entities or organizations, such as, banks, embassies, hospitals, insurance companies, etc., offer services to users, such as, customers or potential customers. For example, banks offer loan services, embassies offer visa services/approvals, etc. The entities or organizations have their own defined procedures (hereinafter, workflows) corresponding to the services, which the users must execute to obtain or participate in the services that are offered. Certain workflows may involve document transactions between an organization and a user, such as where the workflow requires that the user submit a document, multiple documents, or even a significant number of documents to the entity or organization. For example, if a user wishes to apply for a United States (U.S.) visa, then the user needs to submit a set of documents, such as passport, address proof, bank account statement, photo, etc., to the U.S. Embassy.
However, the existing workflows require that the user and the organization communicate in an inefficient, attenuated, and/or adhoc manner (outside of the workflow). For example, the user first completes or otherwise provides information in an application form (online or manually on a hard copy), and then submits supporting documents. In order to perform this operation, the user first manually gathers the original or certified copies of these documents by accessing different sources (such as, a government office, real estate agency, bank, etc.), and then submits the gathered documents to the entity or organization (such as the U.S. Embassy) in person, by mail, etc. The user must provide the entity or organization with an application identity (generated at the time of completing or otherwise providing information in the application form) when submitting these documents. Upon receipt, the entity or organization manually associates or correlates the user's submitted documents with the corresponding user, i.e., application identity, so that the submitted documents are associated with the appropriate user.
This process is cumbersome, time-consuming and/or error prone, and also causes human stress, loss of organizational productivity, etc. For example, this process requires the user to perform multiple steps at different times, such as completing or providing information in the application form, manually gathering the documents, submitting the gathered documents, etc. This process similarly burdens the entity or organization, such as by requiring that the entity or organization associate the submitted documents with the appropriate user. Other inefficiencies may also arise due to the fact that submission of the documents is disassociated or otherwise separated from the user's completion and/or submission of the application form.
In some cases, the user may have an online document account and can retrieve the documents from that account for submission. However, even in these cases, the user needs to separately login to the document account to transfer the document(s) to the entity or organization, and thus, dis-associates the third party workflow from the document account of the user. Here, also the user performs the document transaction outside the organization workflow. It may therefore be beneficial to enable submission of the documents in a manner that is not disassociated or otherwise separated from the user's completion and/or submission of the application form.